Thomas is pawing at his mother’s unconscious form,wailing, and a spark of annoyance flares through Elora. I pick up the fabric rabbit and thrust it into his arms.
‘I’m going to make your mother better,’ I tell him. ‘Look, she’s only floppy like Bunny because she’s tired. Why don’t you take him and go play, now, Thomas.’
He bites his red lip. Wipes a runny nose on his fraying cuff.
‘Go on. And don’t come back till I call for you.’
With a last look down at his mother, and a hesitant nod, he goes. If he ever thinks of this day when he’s older, will he be grateful he has no Gift?
Everything I need is in my bundle. As I unfold it, the hazel spindle rolls to the grass. The silver sickle is in a padded pouch, and when Elora pulls it out I recognise the blade my Gramma Serafina passed to me.
And then I realise what Elora Fenn intends. Surely the shudder that runs through her stooped frame is mine, not hers, for how can she do this to her own flesh and blood?
Out comes our family Starcross. Elora’s knotty fingers linger on the front page, bare of the five names I know come after: Maia, Lilian, Serafina, Sarah, Harper. The last name inscribed there is Susanna’s. How many times my own fingers, as a child, traced over the two swift double-ns in her name as I spoke it aloud, liking the decisive sound of it. How I studied her elegant, curlicued ‘S’, and Serafina’s, and wondered if I should make my own S-for-Sarah more elaborate and fancier, until my grandmother told me to use my own penmanship, for a witch must above all be true to herself.
Elora turns the pages. All are familiar, until she stops on two I haven’t seen before – the double-spread which in our volume is a pair of blank sheets. I recall Lachlan explaining thatin every other Starcross, these pages contain simple herbalcharms.He’s right, for printed here are straightforward plant identifications and instructions, such as most witches learn even before they are Determined. Of all the lore in the grimoire, these two pages undoubtedly hold the least valuable information. Making them the most disposable.
Power thrums through Elora as she readies herself. I don’t recognise the words she intones, which is strange, because it’s the duty of a mother- or father-in-the-craft to teach their successor everything they know. Did Elora withhold this spell so no future Fenn could unseal the palimpsest? Or is it simpler than that? My blood runs cold. If my suspicion is correct, there’ll be no more Fenn witches until Elora’s great-great-grandchild, whom she won’t be alive to teach. Am I about to witness the moment our direct line of instruction is broken? That would explain why I never knew about Haven and the Fenn family’s connection to it.
Elora wipes her palms down the facing pages, and where her touch passes, the words fade and wisp away as if extinguished in smoke. Our breathing is resistant and harsh, choked with more than exertion, but we clear our throat and proceed. A second pass of our fingers presses against the page – and into it, as if space has been hollowed out. The third pass stirs the illusory space and when we pull our hands back a faint shadow pulses there. An emptiness, waiting to be filled. Discarnate hunger.
Elora’s body feels older and more burdened than ever as she turns back to her motionless granddaughter. Wrist trembling, she smooths the unruly Fenn hair, gently tucking it beneath Susanna’s head like a pillow. Fingers lingering on her granddaughter’s cheek, she turns her other palm up in the witch’s blessing.
‘May peace be always at your right,’ Elora mumbles with finality, and behind her eyes I’m shouting,No, that’s not howit goes. The blessing begins with ‘May power stand always at your left hand’.
But then Elora places the silver sickle so it’s ready, and takes up the hazel spindle, and I know what’s coming next.
70
SARAH
I didn’t have to witness it. I don’t think I could have borne it – not knowing that Harper is there inside Susanna, as I am within Elora, borne forward to wherever this story ends. What more can there be left to see or show? I’d hoped our time here would conclude with Elora’s desperate removal of her granddaughter’s dark and dangerous magic.
She would have wound it out onto the spindle, then cut the last shining thread loose with her silver sickle. I’ve used that sickle all my life. It harvested my hazel switches when I was twelve years old and Serafina took me to the coppice and pressed it into my hand. All that time I never knew it had carved away Susanna Fenn’s Gift.
I never knew our Starcross hid her severed magic.
Elora lifts age-heavy eyes and I recoil in surprise, for we stand before my house on the Cobb in Sanctuary.Ourhouse, for at my side Susanna looks at her grandmother and I’m certain I see Harper there, searching for me. I can’t give her any sign of recognition or reassurance. I hope she knows she’s not going through this awful re-enactment of the past alone.
The door opens to reveal a woman who looks a lot like Susanna. Around her age. The same heart-shape face and richly tinted hair. But the neat white apron of a respectablehousewife is tied around her tightly-stayed waist. Like Susanna, yet very unlike her.
‘Grandmother,’ she says. Her mouth purses in distaste. ‘Sister.’
‘Deborah,’ Elora says, and again I feel that pinch of shame that comes to us magicals, from time to time, for the mundane forebears we’ve forgotten. I never knew of a Deborah Fenn. Nor the name of Elora’s Giftless daughter, who birthed her and Susanna. Harper’s children or grandchildren may never learn the name of my mother. One more resentment my mom flung at me before she upped for Florida and left me behind.
‘Your sister’s been unwell,’ Elora tells this other, mundane granddaughter. ‘Took a knock to the head and lost some of her memories. But she’ll be right as rain with your care. And here’s her lovely boy, Thomas. Twelve years married and you’ve no children of your own, Deborah. You know you never will have. Help your sister raise this little lad as your own – your husband will be glad of it.’
Thomas is pinned against Elora’s skirts by our clawed and tremorous fingers, a specimen on display. His mother holds his hand and gazes appealingly at her sister. Deborah looks them up and down, doubtfully. I see the moment she takes a half step backwards and palms the door.
‘I won’t have unnaturalness in my house,’ she says, and my heart aches for her, too, teaching herself not to want what she cannot have. Learning to hate what isn’t hers to love.
Susanna mounts the step, one hand on the doorpost. Eyes wounded. ‘I’m no more unnatural than you, sister! Please help us.’
Susanna doesn’t see the sharp, questioning look Deborah shoots Elora, confused why her proud witch sister is denying her magic.
But Elora nods our head in confirmation. ‘Your sister is nowitch. She and her boy need you and you need them. This house has been too empty too long.’
‘And you?’
